As an online store owner, you are constantly striving to design your shop in the most appealing way to your customers. And the first step to success is to make your product photos shine bright like a diamond. Why Exactly You DO Need Great Product Photos for Your Online Store People don’t buy before they see. Some of them even Continue Reading
The post 5 Attributes of a Great Product Photo for Your Online Store appeared first on Photodoto.
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The US Court of Appeal has reversed a controversial decision that allowed a company promoting a film festival to use a copyrighted photograph on its website without having to pay the photographer that took it. In the original ruling the District Judge of the Eastern District of Virginia allowed the fee-free grab of the image under the rules of ‘fair use,’ thus signaling it’s okay to lift pictures from a photographer’s website.
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| An exhibit provided in the appeal showing Brammer’s photo as it was seen on his Flickr profile. Note the clear ‘All rights reserved’ icon in the lower-right-hand corner. |
Fortunately, in a new ruling, the Appeals Court has determined that the use of the picture was not acceptable ‘fair use’ and that Violent Hues Productions did indeed infringe the copyright of stock photographer Russell Brammer. In a test using four criteria the court found that Violent Hues Productions’ use of the image failed on all counts to pass as ‘fair use’. The court set out the criteria for fair use as being that the image shouldn’t be used for commercial purposes, whether the image had been transformed by the copier, how much of the image that was used and whether its use had an effect on its market value.
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| An exhibit provided in the appeal showing Brammer’s photo as it was seen on the Violent Hues’ website. |
The image, showing a placed called Adams Morgan at night, was downloaded from photographer Brammer’s Flickr site and used by Violent Hues Productions to illustrate a ‘Plan Your Visit’ page on the website of the Northern Virginia International Film and Music Festival. The company initially claimed it didn’t know the image was copyrighted, despite Brammer using the words ‘All rights reserved’ beneath it. Violent Hues Productions also claimed the image was transformed by its cropping of it, and that the use was informational and of benefit to festival goers. The court ruled though that the cropping was done only to make the proportions of the image match others on the same page and that it didn’t constitute a ‘new expression, meaning or message’. The court also found that had the company paid Brammer for the picture its ability to inform festival goers would not have been hindered.
It was also ruled that ‘if Violent Hues’ behavior became common and acceptable, the licensing market for Brammer’s work specifically, and professional photography more broadly, might well be dampened.’
It was also ruled that ‘if Violent Hues’ behavior became common and acceptable, the licensing market for Brammer’s work specifically, and professional photography more broadly, might well be dampened’ and the court went on to state ‘If the ordinary commercial use of stock photography constituted fair use, professional photographers would have little financial incentive to produce their work’.
In its conclusion the court said ‘What Violent Hues did was publish a tourism guide for a commercial event and include the photo to make the end product more visually interesting. Such a use would not constitute fair use when done in print, and it does not constitute fair use on the Internet. Violent Hues’ affirmative defense thus fails as a matter of law. For the foregoing reasons, we reverse the judgment of the district court and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.’
The ruling is especially important as it underlines that commercial bodies do not have the right to lift images from the Internet to use for their own ends without paying the photographer, and that photographers do have protection from those that seek to behave in this way. The court specifically acknowledged that ‘the Internet has made copying as easy as a few clicks of a button’.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Many photographers (and other creatives) know the situation very well: you’re offered a freelance job but once the conversation turns to remuneration it becomes clear that there won’t be any hard cash but instead you’re expected to accept ‘exposure’ in some vague shape or form as payment.
Problem is, it’s very hard to put a value on exposure. The people behind Photography Domination have now come up with a way of quantifying how many ‘exposures’ your photography is worth.
The Exposure Calculator is an easy-to-use online calculator that lets you input some information about your work, for example your level of experience, the photographic genres you work in, your equipment, the number of followers of your Instagram account etc. When you hit the “Calculate” button you get the number of “exposures” you should asking for as a result.
In a very helpful way the calculator also provides conversion rates to US dollars, leads and exposure to social media followers.
Just in case it wasn’t entirely clear that the calculator shouldn’t be taken too seriously, there are notes saying ‘This calculator is obviously created with parody intentions’ and ‘Of course, if you’re serious about becoming a photographer you should almost never work for “exposure” alone.’
Maarten Mellemans, the creator of the calculator, has also authored a blog post in which he gives advice to photographers receiving ‘work-for-exposure’ offers.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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| Illustration showing copyright infringements by continent, used with permission |
Image rights enforcement company Copytrack has released its new Global Infringement Report 2019 study detailing the current state of unauthorized image use around the world. According to the company, it performed a statistical analysis of more than 12,000 Copytrack user profiles as part of its new report, which details the number of ‘potential copyright violations’ the company dealt with from December 2017 to December 2018.
Based on its analysis, Copytrack estimates more than 2.5 billion images are stolen every day with potential daily damages estimated at up €532.5 billion / $ 598 billion. Due to the vast number of images used daily, the company found that most photographers and agencies were unaware of many instances of image infringement.
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| Illustration showing the top 20 most image infringing countries, used with permission |
The study found that the majority of copyright infringement cases originated from North America at 33.90%, with Europe coming in second at 31.40% and Asia in third with 29.38%. The company isn’t able to answer why Asia had lower rates of infringement than NA and EU regions but speculated it may be due, in part, to the percentage of regular Internet users in each continent.
Looking at infringement numbers by country, Copytrack found the US had the highest percentage at 22.96%, followed by Panama at 6.76%, China at 6.57% and Germany at 6.32%. The percentage drop quickly from there, coming in at 3.75% for the UK all the way down to 1.25% for Switzerland, 1.16% for the Netherlands and 1.05% for Vietnam.
Below is the report in its entirety:
Of the infringing use, Copytrack found Full HD 1920 x 1080 resolution images were the most commonly used. Most unauthorized use involved images with 3:2, 2:3, and 1:1 format ratios, as well as 640 x 400 and 800 x 800 resolutions. Copytrack concludes its report, stating, ‘This problem will most likely continue at a similar rate until major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and the like figure out a way to reliably identify the authors of images posted online.’
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
The post Polarr Online Photo Editor Review appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Glenn Harper.
It’s hard to evaluate photo-editing software without comparing it to Photoshop. You tend to have preconceptions about what it should be capable of and how it should behave – even how it should look. In terms of functionality, many programs will struggle to compete against Adobe. In this Polarr online photo editor review, you’ll find out what you can get for free. Or not much more than free.
The colorful interface of Polarr. You can create specific effects under “Toning” by setting the hues of shadows and highlights.
Online photo editors work in your browser. They can be sophisticated, but the days of some of them (namely, flash-based programs) are numbered. Adobe will stop supporting flash in 2020, so anything that runs off it is likely to vanish or wither away.
Modern online editors are written in HTML5 code. They load quickly, but they also tend to be more basic than flash-based equivalents. Polarr is different. You can use Polarr online in a browser, or you can download it for offline use. There’s also an app for your phone.
One of the best things about Polarr is its design. It doesn’t try to be Photoshop, and it’s intuitive to use. With filters on the left and most of the tonal and color tools on the right, there are shades of Lightroom about it, but it has a look of its own. You open Polarr, and you want to use it – or at least I did.
A favorite Polarr feature of mine is its histogram. It’s neater than any other I’ve seen in online editors. It shows a colors histogram by default, which you can expand into separate RGB histograms. In the absence of a clipping display, it’s useful to see what your edits are doing to the image. You can drag the semi-opaque histogram wherever you want in the frame.
Like most browser editors I know of, you can’t open hefty 16-bit files in Polarr. You’re limited to editing 8-bit JPEGs. This isn’t bad as long as the quality of the JPEG is high and it hasn’t been saved many times before. However, theoretically, you must submit to a lower-quality workflow.
A more limiting aspect of Polarr is that it exports everything in an sRGB color space. This might be a constraint of its coding, but it’s less than ideal if you want to print your files on an inkjet. For the web and online photo labs, it’s fine. In mitigation, it does embed a profile when saving, which some rival products neglect to do. You do know where you stand with it.
Polarr has one or two shortcomings, but it’s still a program with a lot of depth. Who would use it? Anyone looking for the following:
The Polarr Wiki website has had a lot of work put into it and includes many written and video tutorials.
Polarr is nice to look at – clean and colorful – but how is it in use? I set out to learn what it could do. If I couldn’t do things the same way I can in Photoshop, what workarounds could I find? Polarr is sophisticated, so I was confident I could perform the most basic processing tasks and more.
I never shy away from hitting “auto” or “auto enhance” buttons in editing programs, because sometimes they give you a better starting point. In Polarr, Auto Enhance is aggressive with the Dehaze slider, and that tends to block shadows. You can tweak the result, of course, with the shadows, blacks and contrast sliders for instance. Auto-enhance does work well with flat, hazy images and can create eye-catching results in a single click.
This was a flat-toned file that has been made quite dramatic by Polarr’s auto enhance feature. The shadows have started to clip, but not anywhere important in this case.
Leaving the auto settings and moving onto manual adjustments, Polarr offers Lightroom-style color and tonal controls (the latter called “Light”). It has Temp and Tint sliders for white balance, but no auto-white-balance tool to outrank your eyesight. A Vibrance slider boosts color without clipping.
When adjusting tone, Polarr offers highlights, shadows, whites and blacks sliders, which you move to achieve a full tonal range while watching the histogram(s). This replace a levels adjustment. Whites and blacks adjust large areas on either side of mid-tones. Highlights and shadows adjust only the brightest or darkest parts of the image.
Some basic editing in Polarr (original shown in inset – not part of software). Balancing the exposure a little, warming the color temp and adding some vibrance.
Again, the controls in Polarr are neatly laid out and colored according to their function. The controls haven’t been arbitrarily renamed, so you quickly know what things do if you’ve used other editors. Being mildly obsessive about detail, I miss the clipping display and being able to correct color by numbers (which is what auto-white-balance tools basically do). However, Polarr still has much to offer.
Polarr’s curves are modishly minimalistic, and they’re useful for some basic color correction. You have a composite RGB curve for adding contrast, and then there are the separate red, green, and blue (RGB) curves.
Not the finished result, but you can see how the color neutralizes as the histograms align. The left-hand picture is typical of artificial lighting. A blue histogram leaning to the left indicates yellow.
Used in conjunction with the RGB histograms, you can use RGB curves to remove color casts. You do this by adjusting any necessary curves so that the histograms roughly align with each other.
You can place a point in the middle of the curve and pull it up or down, or for shadows and highlights, place a point in the bottom or top corner and pull it along the outer axis. Polarr gives you the input and output RGB values while you work.
Sharpening always strikes me as a bit of a dark art in that; whatever method you use, there’ll always be experts out there espousing a better way. In Polarr, you get a clarity slider that sharpens mid-tones and generally adds punch to images (easy to overdo) and a very basic sharpening slider with no radius control. The sharpening might be smarter than I’m giving it credit for, but there aren’t numerous fancy ways to sharpen in Polarr. I’m doubtful that that matters.
Other useful features I haven’t yet mentioned include an elegant crop tool, a spot-removal tool with heal and clone modes, and distortion correction. Spot removal was a bit frustrating at first with my laggy browser, but it works.
I made the inset darker so you can just about see the original dust spot, which has been cloned over by the right-hand circle.
Polarr also includes film filters, a text tool with various graphics, and a face retouch tool with skin smoothing for flattering portraits. Plus, you’ll find grain, diffuse, pixelate and fringing effects. You can also add frames to your pictures.
One of Polarr’s film filters (M5) looks suspiciously like the teal-orange “movie” effect, which you either love or hate. Once I latched onto that, I started seeing it everywhere (Outlander, recently). Therapy is ongoing.
The Pro version of Polarr is subscription based, but it’s at a price you may not balk at. The Pro features are cleverly integrated into the free version, except you can’t save a photo that includes Pro edits. A pop-up appears asking if you want to upgrade or try the feature. What are the features?
The chief advantage of Polarr Pro is the inclusion of masks for localized adjustments. They include radial, gradient, color, brush, depth and luminance masking tools. These are all ways to select specific parts of the image for editing, and they work well.
Masking a bronze equestrian statue for some localized editing. Overlapping edges can be tidied up later.
You can use the brush tool if you want to manually select an area for better control. This includes an optional “Edge Aware” aid that, if used carefully, helps avoid overlapping edges when you’re painting areas in for selection. Brush size, compare, hardness, flow, feathering, erase, view mask and invert options are also present with masks.
In this picture, I’ve brought detail out in a near-silhouetted statue. Of course, I can alter shadows without masking, but other edits like clarity, contrast, exposure and saturation are usually universal.
Whether with a mask or separately, you have the option of inserting an overlay effect. That might be your own added background or one of the many included ones (e.g., clouds, sky, weather, backdrops). This is all good stuff for people that like to experiment and create digital composites. A choice of blending modes helps you achieve the effect you’re after.
The sky in this photo was a little washed out, so I’ve dropped one of the more subtle Polarr skies in as an overlay.
In Polarr, you can’t mask off sharpening in large single-tone areas. So, if your images are noisy and you think the noise will show in the final result, the Pro version offers color and luminance Denoise sliders. These are universal edits that don’t currently combine with masks.
The denoise tool is part of the Polarr Pro offering. Here you can see a before and after with quite a lot of luminance noise reduction applied to the right.
Aside from the sRGB constraint and occasional lag (perhaps my sluggish PC), I enjoyed Polarr. The sRGB thing may be universal among browser editors, and if you think of Polarr as a way of prepping photos for online labs or the web, it’d be hard to beat. Polarr is uncommonly pretty, which seems superficial, but the attention paid to aesthetics invites use. I’d love to know what you think!
The post Polarr Online Photo Editor Review appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Glenn Harper.
Canon USA has launched RAISE, its first online photo community. The platform offers photographers a destination for storing their images, which are organized using Canon’s artificial intelligence engine. Users have the option to create Collections for privately sharing images with others outside of the community, and they can browse other users’ images via a personalized feed.
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RAISE’s most notable feature is its AI-powered organization, which includes auto-tagging images with the subject, category, color, style, composition, and emotion. Canon designed the platform for more than just uploading images, however, with Canon USA President Kazuto Ogawa explaining, ‘Creativity is born from community – from collaboration with like-minded individuals. With RAISE, we are building that community for photographers.’
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Photographers have the option of publicly sharing their work with the RAISE community. Images can be uploaded in high-resolution JPEG format, and starting in March, Canon will release a RAISE plugin for Adobe Lightroom Classic CC. The company says its users retain ownership of images uploaded to the platform.
Canon is showcasing RAISE at the Wedding Portrait & Photography Show in Las Vegas through March 1, 2019.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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DJI has launched its Geospatial Environment Online (GEO) 2.0 system in 32 European countries, the company has announced. Under this expansion, DJI has brought its more advanced bow tie-shaped runway safety zones as a replacement for its previous circle-based geofences. The drone company has tapped Altitude Angel as its partner for geospatial data on airports, Temporary Flight Restrictions, and other ‘sensitive areas.’
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DJI first revealed its updated geofencing system for US airports in October 2018. With this version of the software, DJI’s system enables airports to better protect their runways and other sensitive areas from unwanted drones, helping avoid future incidents like the UK’s holiday airport shutdowns.
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As the company previously explained, GEO 2.0 offers 3D safety zones with bow tie shapes, including low, medium, and high risk models that accommodate different security needs. Of the 32 European countries covered by this expansion, 19 weren’t previously included in DJI’s 2016 launch of its original GEO system; the other 13 countries were using its older software.
According to DJI, European countries will start getting access to GEO 2.0 this month. DJI drone owners in these countries will need to update their drone firmware and DJI GO 4 app to accommodate the new geofencing technology.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
If you want to create a logo for your company and you do not have any design knowledge, I have good news to give you since there are a large number of online tools with which you can make your logo for free. The vast majority of these tools are going to ask you to register to download the new Continue Reading
The post 10 Online Tools to Create a Free Logo appeared first on Photodoto.
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Developer and photographer Christopher Kalafarski has created a free tool that enables users to compare and preview various aspect ratios with their own images. Unlike comparisons in an application like Lightroom, Kalafarski points out that his ratio.party tool is simple to use and offers a wide range of sample ratios.
Users can add their own image to the tool by dragging and dropping them onto the Web page. Ratio.party features an input format box at the bottom, which can be clicked to cycle through multiple format options. Users can enable and disable horizontal and vertical lines, and click lines to crop the image at them.
Though the tool works on mobile devices, Kalafarski explained in a Reddit post that he designed ratio.party for desktop browsers. The tool operates locally in the browser, meaning user images are not uploaded to a server.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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On September 10, stock image company Picfair introduced a new option for photographers to showcase their work called Picfair Stores. The online storefronts went live for all users a couple weeks later and are now joined by a new subscription option called Picfair Plus. Customers who sign up for Plus get access to new features, including support for custom templates and custom domains.
The free Picfair product enables users to create their own online store with custom prices for image sales. Picfair Plus builds upon that, enabling customers to connect the store to a custom domain, add social media profiles, eliminate Picfair branding, sort content into albums, choose design themes, and set up custom image ordering on the store’s home page. Below is a comparison of the free and Plus versions of Picfair Stores.
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In addition to the new features, Plus customers get early access to new future features and highest priority customer service. Picfair Plus is priced at £4.99 / $ 5.62 per month, but there’s also a £49.90 / $ 64.66 annual subscription option. A sample Picfair Store with Plus features is accessible here.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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